Teacher effectiveness is of utmost importance with respect to educational quality, and determines levels of student accomplishment and societal outcomes in general. Through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling of Russian language lessons, this study investigates how well the observed teaching practices align with Federal State Educational Standards (FSES, FGOS in Russian) and contrasts the findings for more and less effective teachers. More effective teachers design their lessons around central topics within the curriculum, they have greater coherence and alignment with FSES goals. Less effective teachers pick generic topics the lessons hardly ever touch upon. The proposed procedure not only yields insights on teaching strategies but also provides a template for the development of data-driven tools for assessing instructional quality in various educational settings. The results confirm the ability of topic modeling to advance the appraisal of actual educational practices in Russia and beyond.